05/30/2010

Sweetspeare's Sirens: Chapter Four, part 6

After much litigation, since his wallet was missing and there was
neither suicide note nor proof that he had purposefully made the jump,
Mr. Wilson Sr.’s extremely generous insurance policy was paid in full.
Grieving but with renewed determination “to build an economic empire in
my father’s name,” Mr. Wilson Jr. finally had enough capital to convert
The Reverie into reality.

“Mr. W. Jr. spent nine million dollars
to turn the Midnight Mansion into the corporate offices of WIPE.
If he had not been a Black man, he would have been recognized as the
financial genius he is, years ago,” Maceo said.

Genius
or not, like Henry Ford or J.C. Penny and other great self-made men, Mr.
Wilson Jr. was a bitch to work for. You either did it his way or you
didn’t do it at all. He knew what he wanted: Money. His employees knew
what was expected of them: To help make him money.

Mr.
Wilson Jr. made his money by adopting established magazine formats from
the Luce family and forging them into new Negro publications in his own
image.

Since the earliest Negro newspapers in the
1700s, the Black press served as an avenue for protest; first, as a call
to end slavery, later as cry against Jim Crow laws and lynching. Back in the early 1940s when
Woodcock Wilson Jr. and Woodcock Wilson Sr. started Colored
Cavalcade, they broke with the Negro press
tradition. Rather than always reacting to white oppression, Colored
Cavalcade ran essays by Negro intellectuals and activists. When Mr.
Wilson Jr. later began publishing Raven magazine three years
later, he dictated that its format focus on Negro achievement. Raven
and the other WIPE publications served as the antidote to the steady
diet of bad news reported about Blacks in the white media.

Raven
was miscegenation of print and photojournalism. There was more space
dedicated to photography in the magazine than there was to text. Every
edition of Raven was chockfull of stories about the first Black
to achieve this and the first Black to accomplish that. It featured
well-heeled and well-educated Negroes in black and white and color
photos. The story didn’t matter nearly as much as the subjects who were
always Black and beautiful. These people were succeeding against all
odds; overcoming all obstacles. Their success was there for other
Negroes to see, read and emulate. For those who were not quite as
singularly successful, each month there was the Raven’s Spectacular
Souls column, which featured seven Blacks that were hired or
promoted to first positions by Fortune 500 corporations—firms that could
then be approached by Mr. Wilson Jr. or his advertising sales director.

“Folks
look at this building and Mr. W. Jr.’s wealth and take it all for
granted,” Ernie said to me one day while I was in his office seeking
advice on how to write a transition between paragraphs in a story I was
working on. “It looks easy now, but it wasn’t always that way. Even
after the man got circulation way up on Raven and Hep, he
had trouble selling advertising. He couldn’t get past
the secretaries in those castles in the sky.”

Ernie got up from his desk and walked past
me. He looked out to make sure no was one in earshot. Just to be safe,
he quietly shut his office door. “But, I don’t care what you think about
him as a boss, the man is cunning when it comes to business. Mr. W. Jr.
began finagling his way into becoming the first Black on one strategic
corporate board after the next. He’d spend more than a year religiously attending
meetings, not making any pitch whatsoever and generously donating. After a while, he’d become friendly with the CEOs on the
board who ran big corporations. Soon, they began approaching him,
asking, ‘Woody, are we advertising in your magazine?’ And, two or three
months later,” Ernie said, “they were in.”

“Slick,” I said.

Ernie
smiled in agreement.

My smile fell away as I thought
about Mr. Wilson Jr., the boss, not the Black business pioneer. “But
he’s such an asshole,” I said.

“If you think its rough
around here now, you should have been here back in the days when he
wasn’t rich and influential. He’d fire people coming and going,” Ernie
said. “Sometimes he’d let go 20 employees at a time. You’d leave work
for the weekend and a Western Union telegram would be waiting on you at home informing you that ‘your services are no longer needed. STOP. Don’t
bother to return to WIPE on Monday to collect your personable
possessions. STOP. They will be mailed to you at your place of
residence. STOP.’”

“Heartless,” I said. Mr. Wilson
Jr. had fired Ernie on two separate occasions, hiring him back a few
weeks later both times.

“That’s why he’s where he is
today.”

“How have you managed to take it all these
years?”

“You’re young. You’re idealistic. You don’t
fully understand what’s ahead for you. Either you bend or you break.
Some choose not to bend. To stand tall. They end up literally or
figuratively broken. I’ve chosen to bend so that I may choose my time to
stand tall.”